Fernando Birri

Argentine painter, writer, poet, filmmaker, theoretician, and teacher, known as the father of New Latin American Cinema.

He studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografía in Rome between 1951 and 1953. Upon returning to his country, he founded the University's Film Institute del Litoral, where Birri took his first steps as a teacher and filmmaker with the production, in collaboration with his students, of Tire Dié in 1960. The film, which denounces the living conditions of a marginal neighborhood in the city of Santa Fe, is considered the first documentary of a socio-political nature made in Argentina. All his filmography, which also includes works of fiction, is crossed by a concern to find a language that expresses the true history and contradictions of Latin America with its own personality. His work as a teacher culminated in the founding, together with Gabriel García Márquez, of the International Film and Television School of San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, of which he was director between 1986 and 1991.

He returned to Rome on several occasions throughout throughout his life, fleeing from the Argentine military dictatorships, with subsequent and long stays in Cuba, Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil. In the Italian capital, he made ORG, an overflowing experimental film that took him ten years of work and was withdrawn the same day it was released by its protagonist Terence Hill.